Which memory card brand do you prefer?

[masp]

So I've gone from figuring out which camera to buy to which brand of compact flash to buy. I guess that's progress. Who do you trust your data to?

I've done a little reading so far, and it seems Transcend gets good reviews and Sandisk is also well regarded, but more expensive. Kingston cards have had some problems with Canon cameras in the past "CF error", but maybe this is isolated. There's also Ri-data, Patriot and a few other well known brands. Any tips on what to do or avoid?

Also how fast a speed card do you need? I was thinking of starting out with something affordable around $10-$20, there's a bunch of 133x cards as well as a faster 200x Sandisk in this range, but it's sold by BlueProton on Amazon. The same card sells for $37 at B&H. Hmm, maybe it's a fake one?

[Fortytwo]

I'm a sandisk user myself and they've proofed pretty reliable. I never buy big cards (my biggest is 4Gb), I just buy a lot of them. If one fails, at least I don't lose a lot...

[Richard]

I am on SD, I have a mixture of cards from 1Gb to 4Gb, my favourite card are samsung class 6, because they look cool and were reasonably priced. I hear the SanDisk are faster and reliable.

Like 42, I like to use smaller cards and split up work across several cards so I don't lose to much in the result of card failure. Also it's best to leave a little bit of space at the end of your card as this reduces the risk of data corruption.

[AcadieLibre]

The best one that is on sale.

[craigUK]

I use CF cards which range from 2GB up to 16GB.
I mainly use Sandisk and Kingston brands.

[Greg_Nuspel]

I wouldn't buy off shore memory cards, a friend thought he'd try that saved big bucks. It wasn't too long and he was out having a glorious day shooting and suddenly the camera went 'can not format card' (I may have the actual wording wrong). Basically the card died, totally unrecoverable. This leads me to believe the card was a factory second possibly scooped out of a dumpster and sold on ebay.

[Wicked Dark]

Kingston and Sandisk. 8gb is the largest I have. Will pick up a couple more once husband books tickets to California for our spring trip. Woo hoo!

[masp]

Great advice folks! Using smaller cards to reduce your risk of loss seems like a good idea. I also heard on another podcast that it's a good idea to format the cards every time that you re-insert them, to help prevent corruption, presumably from a flipped bit somewhere.

By the way, how important is card speed these days? I heard that since cameras come with a fair amount of cache, it may not be as important. I'm thinking of going with a middle of the road speed, such as 20MB/s or so, rather than the bleeding edge extra expensive cards for now. Cheers.